Picture Saturday

I finally remembered to bring my camera (or at least my phone) into class so I could snap some pictures of what we had made.

We started out the day making Naan, the Indian flatbread.  We made half using these onion seeds and half without.  The onion seeds did not taste good to me or to most people in the class, I think.  The Naan turned out well, although chef said it was a little flat.  This comes from rolling the dough rather than shaping it (think pizza dough).  All of us ate at one long table today and our Naan got rave reviews from the other students, so I was happy about that.

Along with the Naan, we also made the classic French dish, Chicken Curry.  Ha!  I don't know if I've said, but when we write our daily menus, we have to write our recipe titles in French.  There wasn't even a translation for Chicken Curry, we just wrote it "Chicken Curry".  In any case, it was very good.  Ours ended up not being very spicy and a little darker than it should have been, but it tasted very good, I thought.  We had a bit of a problem because our sauce had reduced way too much and by that point, it's hard to add more liquid without diluting the spices in the dish.  And, you don't want to just add more spices because they don't really get cooked into the dish.  Brian, my teammate had a great idea to add the spices to extra chicken stock and cook it down a bit and then add it into the dish.  Worked great, we just needed a little more heat in the dish.

Alongside the curry, we made basmati rice with many of the same spices and also some saffron.  

I really enjoyed this meal and have all the ingredients to make the chicken curry for dinner tonight (and lunches this week).

Finally, we made apple beignets.  When I think of beignets, I think of the classics at Cafe du Monde in New Orleans.  These were nothing like that.  Basically, ours were battered apple rings that we deep fried, more like an apple fritter of sorts.  The batter is interesting, made with yeast, beer and whipped egg whites, among other things.  When they come out of the fryer, you sprinkle them with cinnamon sugar.  Good, but weird.  As you can see, we made our beignets square - trying to stand out.

I have to work on my paper on cinnamon, which is due tomorrow.  In two weeks, we have our second set of exams (both practical and theory).  Hoping for the best.